Increasingly, artists, craftspeople, and designers from around the world are gathering familiar mass-produced goods as their new raw materials, using both pristine products and castoffs to create works that are completely unexpected, while at the same time surprisingly familiar. The result is a collection of pioneering work from a wide range of artists who successfully combine the industrially uniform with the uniquely handmade.

About the Exhibition

Manufractured highlights a variety of pieces from Bay Area practitioners whose work embodies the active and thoughtful accumulation, organization, and transformation of familiar products through a novel combination of hand, tool, machine, and digital processes.

Ultimately, the projects presented in the exhibition point the way forward to meaningful change, new aesthetic possibilities, an expanded sense of both beauty and utility, and perhaps most significantly, a reaffirmed sense of hope that is resident in, and integral to, the creative process itself.

The Curators

Exhibition curators and CCA professors Steven Skov Holt and Mara Holt Skov first introduced this new class of objects in the book Manufractured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects (Chronicle Books, 2008) and the accompanying exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon. They continue to gather evidence that the global phenomenon of manufractured is one of the foremost—and most forward—phenomena taking place in art, craft, and design today.